Daughters of the Fog

Chapter 1: The Letter

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which Eloise would later think was fitting. Tuesdays were the days nothing was supposed to happen. Tuesdays were for answering emails and buying groceries and pretending that life in Portland was the life she'd chosen rather than the life she'd settled for. The envelope was thin and cream-colored, addressed in her mother's cramped handwriting—the kind of script that looked like it had been written with a needle rather than a pen.

Eloise stood at her kitchen counter, holding the envelope the way one might hold a letter from a creditor. She hadn't heard from Cecily Frye in fourteen months. Before that, three years. Before that, a Christmas card with nothing written inside except her mother's name.

She opened it.

One line. No greeting, no closing.

*He's stopped speaking, and the stones are coming.*

Eloise set the letter down. She picked up her coffee. She drank it. She set the mug in the sink and washed it, dried it, put it away. Then she sat on the floor of her kitchen and pressed her forehead to her knees and breathed until the shaking stopped.

The stones are coming.

She hadn't been back to Gullswick in six years.

---

The ferry to the Reach left from Burnt Harbor at seven in the morning, and Eloise caught it with four minutes to spare, her duffel bag over one shoulder and her hair still damp from a shower she'd taken in the dark. The boat was called the *Maud Henley*, named after someone's grandmother, and it smelled the way all Maine ferries smelled: diesel and brine and the ghost of a thousand fish.

There were six other passengers. Two of them she recognized—Dottie Peale, who ran the post office on Gullswick, and her husband Gerald, who did nothing Eloise had ever been able to identify. Dottie looked at her with the particular expression islanders reserved for prodigal children: part curiosity, part judgment, part something that might have been pity if you squinted.

"Eloise Frye," Dottie said. "Well."

"Morning, Dottie."

"Your mother know you're coming?"

"She sent for me."

Dottie's eyebrows rose a quarter inch, which for Dottie was equivalent to a gasp. "Did she now." She turned to Gerald and said something Eloise couldn't hear over the engine.

Eloise went to the bow and stood in the spray. The morning was grey and close, the fog sitting on the water like a living thing. She could smell the island before she could see it—that particular mixture of rockweed and spruce and something older, something mineral and cold, like the inside of a cave. The smell of home, if home was a word she was still allowed to use.

Gullswick materialized out of the fog the way it always did, piece by piece, as if the island were assembling itself for her arrival. First the lighthouse, its white tower rising above the murk like a bone. Then the headland, dark with spruce. Then the harbor, with its handful of lobster boats and its single dock, and the cluster of shingled houses that made up the village.

And there, on the cliff above the harbor, barely visible through the fog: the Stone Choir.

Eloise had grown up with them. Eleven standing stones arranged in a rough semicircle on the headland, each one roughly the size and shape of a person. The tourists who occasionally found their way to Gullswick thought they were ancient, Celtic or Norse, dragged there by some forgotten people. The islanders knew better. The islanders knew the stones had names.

The tallest one, the one that stood slightly apart from the others with its face turned toward the sea, was called Old Matthias. Eloise's great-great-grandfather. He'd been a whaler who came home with a cough that wouldn't quit and died in his bed at fifty-three. His wife found him in the morning already grey, already hardening, and by the time the sun set he was stone from crown to sole. They carried him to the headland and set him with the others.

That was the story, anyway. Eloise had spent most of her adult life telling herself it was just a story.

The ferry bumped against the dock. Eloise shouldered her bag and stepped onto the island, and the fog closed behind her like a door.

---

The lighthouse stood at the northern tip of Gullswick, a twenty-minute walk from the harbor along a path that wound through spruce and bayberry. The Frye family had tended it for four generations—first as official keepers, then, after the Coast Guard automated the light in 1987, as unofficial guardians of a building no one else wanted. The keeper's house was attached to the base of the tower, a white clapboard cottage with green shutters and a kitchen that smelled permanently of woodsmoke and salt.

Eloise's mother was waiting on the porch.

Cecily Frye was sixty-one years old and looked exactly as she had when Eloise left: thin, straight-backed, her grey hair pulled into a knot so tight it seemed to be holding her skull together. She wore a flannel shirt tucked into canvas trousers and rubber boots, and she held a mug of tea the way other people held weapons.

"You came," Cecily said.

"You wrote."

They looked at each other. The fog moved between them like a third person in the conversation.

"How bad is it?" Eloise asked.

Cecily's mouth thinned. "Come inside."

The kitchen was the same. The same cast-iron stove, the same pine table scarred with knife marks, the same window looking out over the rocks where the sea threw itself against the island with patient, endless violence. Eloise set her bag by the door and followed her mother through the house to the back bedroom—the one that had been her parents' room for as long as she could remember.

Jonas Frye sat in a chair by the window.

He had been a big man once. Eloise remembered him filling doorways, his voice carrying across the water when he shouted to other fishermen, his hands enormous and rough and always smelling of bait. The man in the chair was diminished, shrunken, but that wasn't what made Eloise stop in the doorway with her hand on the frame.

His right hand was stone.

Not metaphorically. Not the way you might say someone's expression was stony, or their heart. His hand, from fingertips to wrist, was grey granite. It sat in his lap like something that had been placed there, a geological specimen, except that it was attached to his arm, and his arm was still flesh—pink and freckled and human—up to the point where it wasn't.

Eloise looked at her mother.

"It started three weeks ago," Cecily said. Her voice was flat, controlled, the voice of a woman who had already done her screaming in private. "The fingertips first. Then the palm. It's past his wrist now. You can see—" She gestured. "The line moves about an inch a day."

"Have you taken him to the mainland? To a hospital?"

"What would I tell them? That my husband is turning into a rock?"

"That something is wrong with his hand. His skin. Something."

Cecily shook her head. "I called Dr. Pembrook on the mainland. She came over, took one look, and said she'd never seen anything like it. Suggested we see a specialist in Boston. I asked Jonas if he wanted to go. He just looked at me."

"Because he can't speak."

"He hasn't said a word in a month."

Eloise crossed the room and knelt beside her father's chair. He looked at her with eyes that were still his—brown, deep-set, full of something she couldn't name. Recognition, yes. And something else. Something that looked like fear.

"Dad," she said. "It's me. It's Eloise."

He blinked. His left hand—the flesh one—rose and touched her cheek. His fingers were warm. Human.

She took his right hand. She had to. She had to know.

It was cold. Not cold like skin in winter, but cold like stone is cold—deep, permanent, indifferent. She could feel the grain of it under her fingers, the slight roughness of granite. Where his pulse should have been, there was nothing. Just rock.

"Oh, Dad," she whispered.

He looked at her, and his mouth moved, but no sound came out. Just the faint grinding of jaw against jaw, like millstones.